Anarchy Online: Alien Invasion Wiki Guide

General - Team Mission Combat Tactics - Part 2

Adventurer: If you keep your evades way up and use your run buffs, you make a perfectly acceptable puller. If you're a melee adventurer, and you want to pull, remember to make sure you set your aggdef to 49% or below first. Otherwise, if you're not a puller, you're a fighter. You are not a healer, so get over it. You heal just well enough to keep yourself alive while soloing, and you know it. You do not have the nano pool to keep up with the damage in a tough fight, nor do you have the health buffs and HoT's that a doctor uses to raise effectiveness. If you are the only healer the team has, the team is in trouble.

Agent: You are the quintessential sniper. You will be begged by people who don't know better to use False Profession just to provide them with their favorite buffs. Don't do it. The smartest thing you can do is use False Profession: Meta Physicist to hang a healing pet off of yourself, to make up for your terribly low BodyDev. This also lets you buff any puppeteers in the group, and the healer. But remember, the safest place for you to be, for everyone's sake, is one room behind everyone else.

Bureaucrat: You are the quintessential traffic cop. Nobody does it better. No team should be without a bureaucrat, and more people are learning it. And if people follow the instructions above, your traffic control abilities will actually work; otherwise, find another team. Also, if you're in one of those ranges where long charm works and you want a charmed enemy to help the team, make sure that you announce this early. With any luck, you can announce your intention to mezz the target during the time between when the puller announces it and when the target enters the kill zone. Also, don't rely to heavily on your 'bot, it's the weakest pet there is. But if you can afford to buy the nanos for 'bot summoning well above the level you can self-equip, do so, so that if you team with a trader and/or a meta-physicist, you can summon a slightly more useful pet. Finally, an important warning: If there is anyone on your team who uses sniper rifles, shotguns, or sniper bows, have a long talk with your team mates before you turn on any of the Motivational Speech nanos that buff critical hit chance. Increasing their chance to do critical hits also increases the chance that they will draw the enemy's attention away from the meatshield.

Doctor: You are the quintessential healer, and nobody does it better. If you add your health buffs (long and short) to the meatshield's health buffs, plus your best HoT, you then you hardly have to worry about healing the meatshield! Of course, this assumes that your meatshield isn't a gimp when it comes to NCU space. If they are, then you are going to break your back jumping up and down to recharge your nano pool. Finally, the stupidest thing that doctors do is to lower their "aggdef" to 49% or below, in the mistaken belief that this protects them from being attacked. It doesn't. Yes, it keeps you from returning attacks, but your little weapon attacks aren't going to make a difference to how much aggro you draw. You need to count on the rest of your team's ability to taunt. Because when you lower your aggdef, you also slow down your healing nanos, a lot, and the extra delay could mean death to you all. If the meatshield goes down, you won't last much longer. Finally, once you can afford to do so, buy nanos far above your ability to self-equip, and load up on NCU space. That way, if you team with a meta-physicist, they can buff you up to be an even better healer.

Enforcer: You are the quintessential meatshield, and nobody does it better. You should already know that, since your first nano is named Meatshield. You do need, however, to avoid two mistakes, both of which get your team members killed: you need to not be gimped in your NCU, and you need to not be gimped in your taunter. You need to have roughly 1 unit of NCU memory per level free for the doctor, after all of your own buffs, to reach peak effectiveness. And you need to be just as zealous about using implants to overequip your aggression enhancer or taunter as you are your armor and weapon. Taunters only work well on mobs near or below their level; if you're going to hunt level 150 mobs, you need to be able to equip a level 150 taunter. If you do these two things, you're a hero. Otherwise, you're a risk to your team, because they'll be counting on you to be able to do things that you just can't do. One final note: You can survive as a puller, too, if the team doesn't have a better one. But if you do, keep your ctrl-9 "Stats" window open, so you can switch from 49% aggdef to 100% quickly. You absolutely must lower your aggdef to 49% while pulling, because otherwise you will counter-attack while running, and that draws adds.

Engineer: By the time you layer all four shield buffs onto your 'bot, it makes an almost acceptable meatshield, not least of which because it's not a tragedy if it falls over dead. (Well, not the tragedy it would be if a team member did.) No, its real drawback as a meatshield lies in the fact that it doesn't taunt worth a crap, and you know it. Use a taunt trimmer and a positive aggdef trimmer, anyway, to get what good you can out of them. If you can raise the money to do so, buy robot summoning nanos far above the ones you can self-equip; that way if you team with a meta-physicist and/or a trader, you're an even greater asset to the team. Finally, consider waiting in the previous room with the snipers, yourself. Use /pet wait to get your 'bot to wait in the kill zone. Target the meatshield. Retreat to "room A," and keep your fingers on the "/assist" and "/pet attack" macro keys.

Fixer: If you can "blitz," you can pull. You're the ultimate pulling machine, especially if you can get your hands on grid armor. Make sure you've got your evades up when you do it, though, and make sure that you keep your aggdef low enough that you can hold off your attack until the meatshield has, and can hold, aggro. If you're not a puller, you're a secondary, so follow those rules above. Stay away from using your cluster bullets or area-effect snares, because both draw aggro like mad. And finally, if you're a ninja looter, you're making the rest of us look bad. Pretty soon not only will you not be allowed onto teams, neither will most of the rest of us. So knock it off.

Martial Artist: You're a fighter. If no better puller is available, and if you've kept your runspeed and evades high enough, you can make an OK puller, but just as I told the enforcers and the melee adventurers, if you do, make sure that your aggdef is at 49% or below, because you need to not start hitting the target yourself until the meatshield is holding aggro. If the healer is in trouble and the meatshield is failing or screwing up, your team heals will serve the dual purpose of drawing aggro onto yourself and providing the healer with a little bit of healing. But unless the healer has layered you with health buffs, you had better not try to be the primary meatshield, because you're really not up to it (especially if you're an opifex, in which case, god forbid you should even try). Finally, even if they ask for it, have a long talk with your team mates before you put a crit buff on anybody than the meatshield; warn them that critical hits increase their risk of drawing the enemy onto them away from the meatshield.

Meta-Physicist: Lose the mez pet. No, really. It calms targets for one second. At the end of the calm, the target recalculates its hate list from scratch. Odds are, the meatshield won't necessarily be at the top of that list. Your mez pet is why everybody else, including you, is drawing aggro. Further, your only think that your attack pet is a meatshield. In fact, it has no taunts, at all, which means no, it's not. What's more, it doesn't have nearly the health to survive as a meatshield, not compared to an enforcer, or even an engineer pet. It's a fighter. Sure, you can hang your healing pet off of it, and that's what you do when you solo. But that only works until the enemy pops your healing pet like a balloon. Speaking of your healing pet, if you're going to use it as a backup healer, or (god forbid) as the team's primary healer, you need to know how to switch it between targets. There's more to it than "/pet heal". By itself, /pet heal won't switch a healing pet off of someone unless they're all the way healed. You need a script in your Scripts directory with three lines: "/pet behind", then "/delay 100", then "/pet heal". Finally, just as I told the engineers, you should consider waiting outside the kill zone, back in "room A." Use "/pet wait" to get it to wait in the kill zone, target the meatshield, retreat to room A, and wait with your fingers on the /assist macro and pet attack macro buttons.

Nano Technician: You may think of yourself as a fighter, but you are way too fragile to stand in the kill zone dealing damage. You need to be back one room, in "room A" with the agent(s) if any. If you're the only traffic cop the team has, then obviously you'll need to wait right in or near the door. But even then, what you'd rather do is wait just out of sight of the kill zone until you hear someone cry "add!", then step up and calm it. Your big nukes have a long windup period, so you don't have to wait until the mob gets to the halfway point to start them; you can lead that attack a little, so long as you time it so that it doesn't actually launch until the enemy is around or below half health. On the other hand, your weapon attacks don't do much damage, so you can probably start firing them through the door once the meatshield has drawn aggro. Just be aware that there's some risk in doing so.

Soldier: You probably think of yourself as a meatshield. If you've done everything just right, you might even be able to work as one. But remember this - on your best day, you're not half the meatshield that an enforcer is. The closest thing you have to a health buff is your layered absorption shields - but the healer can't heal/recharge those for you, and they can for the enforcer's Essence line. But yeah, if you have the best possible layered absorption shields and the best possible total reflect shields, and you totally maxed out BodyDev and implanted it, then yes, maybe you can survive as a meatshield. But if there's an enforcer in the group, or even an engineer pet, everyone is better off if you let them have the first few hits. This is especially true if you're one of those soldiers that keeps two weapons slung over your shoulder. If you fire your special attacks from a big & slow weapon like a Flashpoint then switch to a Nova Flow or E-Beamer, you had better be able to withstand the aggro that'll come from doing that. If, on the other hand, you hold your fire for at least a few hits, everybody gets the best of both worlds, even if that does reduce you in importance from meatshield to being the World's Best Fighter. But which would you rather have, importance, or success?

Trader: You are not the best at any team combat role. But subject to your limitations, you make a reasonably good healer, traffic cop, or fighter. Your only big problem as a fighter is that you're a little fragile to be firing a weapon that crits that hard. Your only problem as a healer is that in order to heal others you have to cast a damage-over-time attack on yourself, so keeping aggro off of you is doubly important - you have to recharge both health and nano pool. Your only problem as a traffic cop is that you're a one-trick pony; unlike a bureaucrat, if calm fails and root isn't good enough, you don't have scare or mezz to fall back on. So as long as your teammates understand these things, so they're ready to jump to your help when problems arise, you'll be fine. And if the team's engineer pet is the meatshield, and the engineer has followed my advice to stock up on pet summoning nanos far above his level, you can enhance the whole team's chances of survival if you wrangle the engineer at the very beginning of the mission, so he can summon a much better 'bot.